Hacker who turned in Bradley/Chelsea Manning for military leaks found dead

Adrian Lamo, 37, the Columbian-American hacker who outed then-US Army soldier Bradley Manning for leaking classified military documents and sharing them on Wikileaks, has died, according to reports published Friday.

Friday morning, Lamo’s father, Mario Lamo, announced his son’s death on Facebook, writing, “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquittances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son…”

The coroner for Sedgwick County, where Lamo lived, confirmed his death, but provided no further details. Circumstances surrounding Lamo’s death are not immediately known.

A neighbor who found his body said he had been dead for some time.

The Colombian-American hacker, who resided in Wichita, Kansas, first rose to notoriety in the early-2000s by hacking into systems at The New York Times, Microsoft, and Yahoo, which he was subsequently convicted for.

Lamo was more recently widely known for his involvement in passing information on whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a former US Army soldier who befriended Lamo. In an internet chat, Manning told Lamo that she had downloaded and burned classified files to a disk.

Lamo, with help from two friends in military intelligence, informed the US military of the breach. Manning was later arrested and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Her sentence was later commuted by President Barack Obama, and she was released last year.

Lamo told The Guardian in 2011 that he turning Manning in caused him to have ‘lasting regret’.

‘I think about (her) every day. The decision was not one I decided to make, but was thrust upon me,’ he said.

‘Had I done nothing, I would have been left wondering whether the hundreds of thousands of documents that had been leaked to unknown third parties would end up costing lives, either directly or indirectly.’

Adrian Lamo, a Colombian-American hacker, became famous in the early 2000s for breaking into the systems at organizations like The New York Times, and later for his role in Chelsea Manning’s arrest. The cause of death is not yet known. https://t.co/4thEG8kh2e